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- Issue #616
Issue #616
Essential Reading For Engineering Leaders
Friday 16th May’s issue is presented by QA Wolf
If slow QA processes and flaky tests are a bottleneck for your engineering team, you need QA Wolf.
Their AI-native service gets engineering teams to 80% automated E2E test coverage, helping them ship 5x faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.
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Trusted by Drata, AutoTrader, Salesloft, and many more.
⭐ Rated 4.8/5 on G2
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “What defines a strong engineer is the ability to do tasks that weaker engineers can’t, even with near-unlimited time. But what are the concrete skills or traits that make up that ability? What is it about strong engineers that makes them able to do a much wider range of tasks? In order of importance, I think it’s self-belief, pragmatism, speed, and technical ability.” Sean elaborates on these qualities.
CareerAdvice
— Lizzie Matusov
tl;dr: “Researchers conducted a study inside the software division of Beko, a multinational electronics company. Over 10 months, 238 developers used an AI-based code review tool powered by GPT-4. The study analyzed 4,335 pull requests across three projects, comparing automated vs. manual review patterns, survey feedback, and developer behavior.”
Leadership Management
— Michael Lopp
tl;dr: Just like athletes need more than one drill to win a competition, AI agents require consistent training based on real-world performance metrics to excel in their role. At QA Wolf, we’ve developed weighted “gym scenarios” to simulate real-world challenges and track their progress over time. How does our AI use these metrics to improve our accuracy continuously?
Promoted by QA Wolf
Management AI
— Camille Fournier
tl;dr: “This is not based much on the current state of innovation, except to take as a given that AI is proving to be measurably supportive of building software. It's instead based on my understanding of economics, human nature, and the skills of people working in tech.”
Leadership Management
"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm."
— Max Bernstein
tl;dr: “Every so often I come across a paper, blog post, or video that completely changes how I think about a topic in programming languages and compilers. For some of these posts, I can’t even remember how I thought about the idea before reading it — it was that impactful.” Max shares some of these posts.
LanguageDesign
tl;dr: Clerk Billing is the easiest way to implement subscriptions for B2C and B2B applications. No payment integration code to write, no UI work, nothing to keep in sync. Clerk automatically updates and stores your customer’s subscription status alongside their user data, eliminating the need for complex synchronization code and the ongoing maintenance it requires. Add billing quick using pre-built components and we’ll take care of the rest.
Promoted by Clerk
Tools
— Vincent Cheng
tl;dr: “Before the rise of LLMs, learning was a prerequisite for output. Learning by building projects has always been the best way to improve at coding, but now, you can build things without deeply understanding the implementation. Many interesting and valuable projects are doable by LLMs with my hand-holding. There’s so much low-hanging fruit that execution seems much more of a bottleneck than deep understanding and innovation.”
LLM
tl;dr: “At Uber, we run over 5,000 microservices, 5,000 databases, and over 500,000 analytical jobs per day to support millions of people worldwide using our apps. Over 150,000 secrets facilitate authentication among these large, distributed ecosystems with multiple stakeholders. This also includes over 400 third-party vendor integrations and 400 SaaS applications.”
Architecture Security
— Daniel Hooper
tl;dr: “Some view C as a language so simple and raw that you’ll spend all your time working around the language’s lack of built in data structures, and fixing pointer bugs. The truth is that C’s simplicity is a strength. It compiles quickly. Its syntax doesn’t hide complex operations. It’s simple enough that I don’t have to constantly look things up. And I can easily compile it to both native and web assembly. While C has its share of quirks, I avoid them by habits developed over 22 years of use.”
C Guide
Null Pointer #2
Rubber Ducking
Most Popular From Last Issue
Notable Links
Cap: OS Loom alternative.
Git-bug: Decentralized issue tracker.
HelixDB: OS graph-vector database.
Mem0: Memory for AI agents.
PptxGenJS: Build PowerPoint presentations with JS.
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